John Carmack showcases 60fps ‘Rage’ engine for iPhone 4

Legendary ID co founder John Carmack showcased the new Rage ID tech 5 gaming engine running at 60 fps on the iPhone 4. His Quakecon presentation has press across the world dribbling over their phones this morning.

His demonstration keynote speech which was covered in a live blog by Kotaku showed an upcoming release of the new Rage engine in an iOS game which Carmack said also ran very well on the older 2G iPhone.

The Rage demo is extremely impressive and he lights scenes with radiosity to accurately simulate diffuse indirect illumination and shadows and also showcases ID’s MegaTexture technique of using a single large texture rather than a repeating small texture tile over the radius of a surface.

The only downside is actually the power of the engine as running at 60fps drains a battery very fast. Carmack said that there will be an option to toggle to 30 fps as well for users on the move concerned with killing their battery too quickly.

John Carmack/ID - courtesy of Kotaku

The Rage engine won’t just be targeting the mobile market however with larger launches coming to console platforms later in the year. The iPhone version was originated by an experiment to create something for the Nintendo Wii.

KitGuru says: Carmack has also said that he could create something on the iPhone which would ‘kill anything done on the Xbox or Playstation 2.”